Featured titles
-
Ancestor, a novel by Vladimir Makanin (1982)
Rights sold: Germany - Volk u. Welt, Spain - Alfaguara, Marbot
A satirical vision of the Soviet Union at the times of the Thaw.
Central figure of Makanin´s Ancestor is Old Yakushkin, a healer who has the gift of curing the terminally ill pacients abandoned by official medicine. His healing methods cannot be less orthodox: he waits for the patient to have a crisis to yell at him, shake him, torment his spirit until all his resistance is broken. The satisfactory cure of the dying man is obtained on the basis of terrible speeches and very little food. With irony and pathos, wit and malice, Makanin introduces us to the feverish Yakushkin in all his heartbreaking spiritual evolution: a young playboy, he was accused of fraud and confined to a labor camp in Siberia, where by accident he discovered in himself a healing gift. Makanin's hero recalls the great protagonists of the classical Russian literature.
Read more... -
The Freedom Factory, a novel by Ksenia Buksha
Winner of the 2014 National Bestseller Award (Russia)
Winner of the 2014 Città di Penne-Mosca Prize (Italy)Rights sold: Russia - OGI, World English - PHONEME MEDIA
Poet, writer, and journalist Ksenia Buksha was thirty when she published The Freedom Factory, the novel that won Russia's 2014 National Bestseller prize. Buksha, an economist by training, was just eighteen when her writing began earning critical acclaim. She brings both striking innovation and unflinching maturity to her creative work, while her precisely observed narration and dialogue transport readers through the entire spectrum of Soviet and post-Soviet life, from the absurd to the sublime.
The Freedom Factory is the history of a real military plant in Saint Petersburg from the 1950s to the present, told in monologues by its workers, managers, engineers. The Freedom Factory is not exactly a piece of realism: it combines poetry and documentary in unique proportion, conveying to readers the atmosphere of that extremely absurd, harsh yet magnetic place. Sometimes the narrative comes very close to everyday speech, sometimes it falls into lyricism or grotesque humor, but it always remains amazingly sincere. There are life stories and love stories, military secrets and anecdotes, work and leisure. Lots of different voices merge into a chorus; characters are not named, just denoted with Latin letters – but that doesn't prevent us from feeling with them.
“The Freedom Factory is a thriller, a romance, and a social drama all in one, and—this is especially important—it’s a book by a post-Soviet person about the Soviet experience.” – Dmitriy Bykov, literary critic
“My first impression was that of a … novel written by a slightly drunk Joyce.” – Maxim Amelin, Ksenia Buksha's Russian publisher
“[When I read the novel] I thought of Spanish Nobel laureate Camilo José Cela and his novel The Hive… which through the blending of many disparate voices gives an image of the time, the characters, the particular atmosphere. The Freedom Factory has echoes of this same device.” – Gennadiy Kalashnikov, literary critic
“Ksenia Buksha has successfully done what no one else, it seems, has been able to do: combine utopia and anti-utopia.” – Nadezhda Sergeyeva, literary critic
Read more...